Three little words…

Just three little words can take you to a place of both extreme pleasure and pain, no no no, not blurting out the L word in the hope that it might get you out of trouble or even in to trouble! No that, but something far more sinister. Three little words that often get uttered before you do something epic or incredibly stupid and quite often both! Three little words make up one of those phrases that could end up being one of the most dangerous sentences in the English language, and I repeat its not “I love you”…

So what three little words am I on about then?

“It’ll be fun…”

“Let’s go for a run, it’ll be fun.”
“Let’s run up that hill, it’ll be fun.”

So it’s Wednesday night and we’re heading out of QE Country Park and in the direction of Butser Hill. Looping around the outside of it sort of following the road doesn’t seem so bad to start with. It’s a lovely summers evening, the company is great, there are freshly shawn sheep frolicking in the fields, what’s not to like. Oh, when I say frolicking I actually mean standing there glaring at us wondering what these idiots are doing in their field.

“Ere Tracey, look at these idiots running up this here hill”…

“Ewe gotta be kidding me….”

Or something like that…. So off we head, the long climb up Butser Hill, it’s certainly challenging, but what doesn’t kill you and all that. I’ve been saying my training lacks hills and I need to embrace them, hence my Wednesday night dalliances with them. Not sure if we’re ready for a long term relationship yet to be honest, but I’m going to give it a shot…

When you get to the top of your climb and look back at where you’ve just come from it invokes a certain feeling, not just heavy breathing and the pain of your lungs and quads exploding, but a feeling of pride and accomplishment, a sense of achievement, look at what I just did. Amazing.

The views are just spectacular from up here. It really is worth the effort involved to make the climb and get yourself up to the top. Look at this beautiful place where we live, really, just stop and look at it, as Ferris Bueller famously stated, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”

The other plus side to traversing these hills is that you get to run back down them, waving your arms wildly, emitting a “wheeeeeeeee….” sound either loudly for all to hear or just shared with your inner child, “wheeeeeee…”, God I love running down hills. You’ve just got to let yourself go with it, lean into it and not worry about falling over. Run like a child, without fear, just in the moment. Best therapy ever!

Ah, wait a minute, we have just climbed one side of Butser and ran like loons down the other into a beautiful bowled valley. As there isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, a secret tunnel to get back to the other side it can mean only one thing, onwards and upwards!

This really was a climb and a half, the spine you see in the picture above it what we’d just hurtled down, the valley floor is what we have just wound our way back up, a very serious ascent here! Remember, “it’ll be fun…”

The pictures do the climbs no justice at all, in fact even the garmin graphy thing doesn’t do it justice. Last week I said Windmill Hill was steeper than a steep thing, I lied, this was a steep thing, way way steeper than the last steep thing!

On the plus side we were back at the top of Butser again and everyone still alive, the hills hadn’t killed us, no zombies in sight, just amazing vistas and the moon accompanying us in a group photo.

Check out that tree and the view behind it. It is the Joshua Tree, “I have climbed the highest mountain, I have run through the fields…..only to be with you….”.

Sightseeing over, it can only mean one thing, “wheeeeeeeee…..” back down Butser and grinning like an idiot at the end, marvellous! 5 miles done, “it’ll be fun…” And you know what, it was!